


The Burden of Forgiveness

by fizzygingr



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Afterlife, Force Ghosts, Gen, Self-Indulgent, That's Not How The Force Works, anyway fuck yoda, probably, self-indulgent as fuck, ugly crying, who knows really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 03:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10505073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fizzygingr/pseuds/fizzygingr
Summary: "Defending Luke had been a wild decision, made in a moment when it felt that nothing else mattered. He never imagined it would stick, that he would have to live beyond that. He thought he’d been granted the privilege of dying."The feelsy reunion that I wanted to see.





	

So this was death. Vader hadn’t expected it to be so…visceral. He was no longer a body, now, but a spirit; he figured he should feel like one. But instead he felt the distinct sensation of his muscles violently clenching and shuddering. He was gasping for breath - or for something like it - and the place where his stomach would have been felt as if it had been punched. Arms, legs, lungs - had they been on fire like this back when he’d had them? He felt, for the first time in how many years, the Force as it ran like lightning through his fingers and toes, making them twitch and buzz. It was not the same as having a real body - no, it was somehow more real than he remembered it. So this was death, he thought as he collapsed to his knees. Death was shaking, death was feeling. Death was living.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, even before he noticed a familiar presence.

“Master,” he whimpered, his voice sounding naked without the filter of the mask. Thoughts raced in circles around his head: _You shouldn’t touch me. How can you touch me? I hurt you. I hurt so many. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was this way. It was this way, it’s my fault, you shouldn’t touch me._ “What have I become?” he said.

There was a sad smile in Obi-Wan’s voice when he spoke. “What indeed, Anakin?”

He could cry, too, as it turned out. At the sound of his old name, a name that he didn’t deserve to be called, but that Obi-Wan called him anyway, he broke into wretched cries. And Obi-Wan stayed. He seemed unsure what to do with the hand on Anakin’s shoulder, but he knew enough to not let go.

“This is–hardly the Jedi way,” Anakin choked out between sobs. “What–what would Master Yoda say?”

(He heard the echo of Yoda in the Temple: _Weep, the Force does not. And neither should the one who bears it._ )

Obi-Wan pulled him in closer. “Master Yoda need not say a thing.”

And Obi-Wan wept too, with none of his usual restraint. ( _What’s usual for him now?_ Anakin wondered. _Neither of us is the same._ ) Obi-Wan’s hands gripped his back too tightly, and he vaguely wondered if, in this form, those hands could dig right into and through him.

“He’s a remarkable boy,” said Anakin when the sobbing had slowed. “Luke.”

Obi-Wan nodded in his old serious way. “He saw in you what I’m afraid I’d long given up on.”

“You weren’t wrong to give up on me. I was…so far gone.”

And feeling now the great, crushing weight of it all, he wondered if Obi-Wan was wrong to forgive him at all. Defending Luke had been a wild decision, made in a moment when it felt that nothing else mattered. He never imagined it would stick, that he would have to live beyond that. He thought he’d been granted the privilege of dying.

But to sit with what he’d done, what he’d been; to look Obi-Wan in the eyes after having run him through with a lightsaber, to stop pushing that sick guilt back down his throat–he wasn’t sure he was strong enough for that.

“Master, I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

Obi-Wan was unreadable, even in the Force. He didn’t shake his head and dismiss Anakin, try and tell him that he had every right to be here with him; no, he’d seen too much, been hurt too much himself.

He took up Anakin’s hands in his own.

“Anakin,” he said, looking him straight in the eyes, “Your son forgives you. I forgive you. I dare say the Force forgives you. You may forgive yourself, if you wish.”

“I did…terrible things.”

“You did.”

“It will take time. To make things right.”

“It will.”

“But you’ll…you’ll help me?”

“You are my brother, Anakin,” said Obi-Wan, and oh, by the Force, it felt like a great wrong had been righted. “I love you.”

They wept again, clinging to each other tightly, and Anakin vaguely wondered if this was the balance that had once been spoken of; he felt the Force weeping with them.


End file.
